"I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but Windows 7 shipped around the same time I got married, and it includes a fascinating new technology called HomeGroup. Its goal is really simple: get all your home computers sharing documents, media, and printers with each other, in a way that is both secure and straightforward. But Microsoft also has a deeper aim here: they're trying to finally kill off the decrepit NetBIOS technology that's at the heart of most Windows sharing problems. So let's have a look at HomeGroup and the technologies involved that make it work. And just to keep things interesting, we'll compare HomeGroup with what Mac OS X offers."

Apart from the claimed technical greatness of the product, I still think that networking is a mess, especially on Windows.

Why do you see users who are not logged in on the network on windows 7 ? Makes you think that there's a trojan arround or something.
Why does the firewall warning show up *behind* the application who started it, making it possible to try to play a game for 15 min before understanding that the firewall blocked you when giving up and closing it.
Why can't we just connect two computers with a wire (or more with a hub), wait a bit, then start doing stuff as a network ? Why doesn't windows include that wonder called a DHCP server, making ad-hoc wifi networking and such simple connections much more complicated than they should be ? Why should a mostly unreliable and hard-to-service HW router become a mandatory component of a computer network for people who are not networking specialists ?
Why is wifi so crappy while GSM towers work just fine ?
Why is it that when people join a network, there's a high chance that some can't ping the others or can't see games on LAN, making think that the network itself is defective ? Why does it depend on the machine you consider ? Why do you have to go through several security warnings before you can do something useful on the network ?

Paranoid security rendering things messy and reducing usability. Low reliability. Intuitivity close to zero. Running on top of crappy wireless networks. This is the state of networking as of today. HomeGroup's philosophy is to add up a layer on top of this crap and make solving some specific problems easier. What about fixing the crap underneath instead and make every task of a computer network work properly, instead of just printer/music/video sharing and only provided that you entered an obfuscated password given by some sysadmin wannabe first ?